Over these Lenten weeks we've seen how Pissarro includes people of the peasant class in almost all of his landscape paintings. In the 1880's however, he took these figures out of a generic and distant realm and individuated and magnified them in a series of portraits, but of a different kind. These paintings weren't paid for and owned by the people who sat for them, rather, Pissarro used them as a kind of art-tool to make a socio-political statement of the value and dignity of each human person. Who ever heard of a washerwoman having her portrait done? Only aristocrats, top-of-the-ladder clergy and monied people could arrange for that!
This is Marie Adeline Larcheveque, a much trusted neighbor and mother of four, who was fifty-six when Pissarro asked her to sit for this portrait. He clearly had a deep sympathetic regard for her as he has shown her, not leaning over a scrub bucket, but sitting quietly in the light of an open door at the start or end of her workday.
How unlike our television commercial sense of female beauty, which is eternally young, unlined, thin, glamorous, made up and styled. Pissarro presents Marie Adeline as middle-aged and of rural not "regal" beauty.
On Good Friday, there is the Crucifix and this Pissarro painting, I might recall the words of Jesus in St. John's Gospel: "I shall not call you servants any longer, for a servant does not share his master's confidence. No, I call you friends, now, because I have told you everything that I have heard from the Father." 15:15
